The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  The path became a mere suggestion of a path and faded entirely into a meadow, fragrant of evening and yesterday’s rain.

  “I do know this,” said Simion, sounding even happier. “There’s a spring-fed creek just slightly into those woods on the east side, with good water. A nice little sheltered natural basin. I’ve been here. Camping, on the way to college for the first time.”

  “Camping? Why not just sleep at one of those inns in the town?”

  “That costs money.” He pulled the animal up, and it most gratefully stopped. “Remember, I wasn’t merely obsessive about money in general then, but in the minute particular. I thought of money in pennies. How much wood or milk or how many potatoes one of them would buy. I wouldn’t have considered an inn unless it was storming or snowing, and it was sweet fine summer. I’ll tie this beast to that hickory tree there, and we’ll water him. Then I’m going into the creek myself.”

  “Why, specially?”

  “Because it’s lovely.”

  Doriskos followed him into the woods, too tired to worry about whether they found their way out. Besides, he had come to trust Simion in all practical matters. Woods, like the ledger, were a practical matter. And in fact, Simion was right. He began to smell water before they reached it, then followed the scent into green darkness punctuated with stabs of pine-tinted light, until he could hear the small gurgle of the stream. “ ‘A green light in a green shade,’ ” he misquoted.

  “At first it’s so cold it makes you gasp,” said Simion dreamily. “And then you get used to it. And when you get out, it feels fantastically good. When I was a child, I used to take my baths in a place like this in the summer, then lie in the sun and dry. You should try it.”

  Doriskos put his palm into the slender spring-fed stream. True to Simion’s word, it was so cold it made him gasp. He decided that a bath here might be overstimulating, but tasted the water and found it delicious. He filled his cupped palms and drank, then watched with amazement as Simion skinned out of his underwear and jumped in. The cold knocked the breath out of him at first, but he found a small deep pool and ducked under.

  “Come out of there! You’re turning blue!”

  “Oh, no, now I’m used to it.” Splash!

  “Simion, come out of there at once.”

  Rather than coming out at once, Simion rifled the streambed for pretty stones, noted some watercress growing in the cold green slime at the water’s edge, and found a sleepy turtle. Finally, shivering more than he could hide, he allowed himself to be coaxed out to dry and dress. He picked a handful of cress and washed it, pressing it upon Dori: “It’s delicious. It’ll make a salad for our meal.” It was delicious, a pure crisp flavor of greenness and water.

  After the horse had been watered and fed, they spread the blanket out on the dry grass in the westering sun and ate and drank. Simion bundled up in a couple of heavy sweaters to warm up, helping the process along with cider. He’d taken the turtle from the streambed to watch it sun on the sward; near darkfall, he would take it back to the water’s edge. “I always liked turtles. They’re always gentle, and they always seem to know what they’re about,” he mused. “They don’t seem to need anything but water and peace and a bug or two.” Unlike themselves, who could live at one with this wilderness only for brief daylight sojourns, and distinctly unlike himself, who needed a university appointment, a medical degree, the college degree he ought to have gotten several weeks back, and this man whose needs were as acute and more complicated than his own.

  “So, where next, Dori? We’re disgraced at Yale; do you think you’ve come undisgraced at Oxford by now? Does the Canova undisgrace you at Oxford, at least as far as the Slade School is concerned?”

  “Perhaps. I could write to Mr. Ruskin, if he’s more or less at home, or Pater. It’s possible. It’s fantastic, if you think about it. I got to Oxford because a crazy English aristocrat purchased me. I got disgraced at Oxford for not letting another crazy English aristocrat rape me. You got disgraced at Yale because your insane father tried to kill you. I got disgraced at Yale for not letting him. We’re both disgraced at Yale because we love each other. We’re both here eating chicken in a wilderness. I may get undisgraced at Oxford for a statue that proclaims my love for you to the entire world, the same thing that got me disgraced at Yale. I’m not unhappy. I couldn’t say with any accuracy exactly what I am, but I’m not unhappy. Perhaps merely because I haven’t good sense, perhaps not. Life’s even stranger than I ever guessed. It’s stranger than I am myself.”

  “You aren’t strange. You’re my home,” said Simion matter-of-factly. “It could be a good deal worse. We have enough funds for a while, and our passages are paid. We’ve got furniture, if we can find some way of sending for it. And this chicken isn’t half bad. Nor this cider and cornbread.” Simion licked his fingers. He lay back and laced his fingers behind his damp head, looked up into the deep gold blue of the great sky.

  “It’ll be like this for a while,” he said, again in that dreaming tone. “It’ll be a blue that’s gold, a gold that’s blue, and yet it’s not a diffuse Turner color, but sharp. Look at it, Mr. Luminist-and-Colorist, isn’t that how you’d say it is?”

  “That is how it is,” said Doriskos. He lay down too and opened his eyes to the sky, its darkening brilliance.

  “And on a cool day like this, it’ll be green at the horizon, and grade into this gemlike blue. It’s so clear. In the dead middle of summer, if it’s been a hot day, it goes down orange or a sort of ripe pink. It’s not exactly like Haliburton here. Haliburton is colder, and wilder, and darker, and further up into the thin air. But you can look hard at this and imagine it, Dori. Just exaggerate a few of its qualities in your mind’s eye. I can’t imagine what there was to make people evil and crazy in such a place…”

  “It was beautiful, then?” asked Doriskos, feeling the strangest sense of anticipation.

  “Oh, it was beautiful.” A sigh, a pause. “Will you stretch out your arm?”

  Doriskos did, and Simion put his head on it. In his mind’s eye, Doriskos saw a little child taking a bath in an ice-cold stream, the water even colder than this here, the country steeper, the air thinner, the heat in the depths of the forest more ephemeral. He conjured a high-summer calm, a thick and resinous scent of heat and pine, and that child bounding out, gasping, and making his naked way back to the clearing and the sun. Then, the boy sunbathing, taking in the heat at every pore, reading, as solitary as a dragonfly and no more needful of human company.

  “You made a certain request of me a while ago,” said Simion, sounding both shy and venturesome, reckless and diffident. “Remember, in the mural room? You wanted to know about me. I told you that I certainly owed you the truth, but couldn’t stand to tell it. Well, after what I just got reprieved from, my qualms seem like nonsense. And I also feel fairly sure that you won’t get up and leave me here. After all, you don’t know your way out. And, don’t look hurt at me, I know you don’t want to. You deserve an explanation of a lot of things.”

  “And you want—”

  “I want to tell you everything.”

  This story should perhaps have ended with some violent noise, blood on a shirt or a screaming crowd, and perhaps there are still people who would prefer that it did, but it does not. It is a story of innocence reprieved and freedom, however fragile, sustained. It ends in a meadow, in a wilderness, far enough from humankind for safety, where the grass is turning cold with evening and an old horse, himself reprieved from the knacker, is alternating oats and mountain clover. Perhaps he has some dim awareness that he is a horse in luck; he belongs now to someone who will soon have an impressive stable, but amid the gleaming stallions will be a few gentle old nags like himself, who will be treated with as much affection as if they too ran like water and shone like patent leather. A commemoration, perhaps, of a first, homely but well-loved old horse, almost surely dead now, but remembered by the child, who is alive.

  Rather, the story comes out of the mis
t, where barely a moment of it has been lost, and every single detail and secret will be told to someone who will receive it as carefully as a handful of the most inestimable gems or the purest water.

  Laura Argiri is a bicultural Southerner/New Englander, born in North Carolina and educated in Massachusetts and England. She has lived in Durham, NC, for the past two decades. She believes that marriage should be available to anyone who wants it but has resolutely avoided it herself. She is also an editor, the unseen angel of correct spelling and usage in seventy-three books by the most recent count. Her book reviews have appeared in the Village Voice, Independent, Spectator, Senior Post, and News & Observer, her poetry in Persephone. Lethe Press will publish her short story collection Guilty Parties: Leighlah and Others in spring of 2017.